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Wednesday, 28 December 2011

Pre Miniatures Page Tension

The Minifigs S Range Seven Years War Austrian Grandisca Slovenian Frontier Infantryman recommended by Stuart Reid for service as dismounted Jacobite Hussars.

If the past really is a different country and they did things differently there, the basic nature of wargamers and the Dennis Wise-like ability of a high proportion to start an argument in an empty room seems to date back to early days.

Such an exchange underpins the two articles posted here from Miniature Warfare magazine (April and December 1970). While expressed in slightly more stately terms than many a current day Internet based discussion, there is an elegant hint of scorn on display in the first and last paragraphs of Stuart Reid's article.

I found Stuart Reid's notes on available figures interesting, in particular the reference to Lamming Seven Years war figures. I have never seen these, or any pictures of them; in a later article in 1972 he mentions that Lamming have ceased to make them. i do have a reasonable number of the S Range Jacobite Rebellion figures, which are among my favourite ranges.

This post is intended to be the first in a short series of Jacobite Rebellion (45) posts. This will include Start Reid's later Miniature Warfare articles on refighting the Jacobite Rising of 1745-1746. I have parts 1 and 3 of this series but am missing part 2, which was published in April 1972. If anyone has this article and can provide me with a scan to share here, I would be very grateful. (I have permission from John Tunstill, the publisher of Miniature Warfare, to reproduce material here).

Sources, permissions and editorial policy

This site uses a range of sources to provide access to information about wargaming, for the most part from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. These sources are mainly paper based, may be ephemeral (catalogues, price lists, painting instructions etc), and in general are not easily accessible elsewhere.

I am particularly grateful to Don Featherstone and to John Tunstill, who have both given their permission for the reproduction of materials from their ground breaking magazines, respectively Wargamer's Newsletter and Miniature Warfare (and later Miniature Wafare and Model Soldiers).

Where possible I have made efforts to obtain permission for reproduction of any material covered by copyright.

Some of the source material is typescript, may be fragile, and in some cases to scan or photograph it may require the removal of staples and the destruction of the integrity of the original publication.

I have tried to deal with this in a number of ways, scanning or copying and adding as an image, or scanning for optical character recognition to provide text based posts. Where the content is more important than the aesthetic look of the original context, I have also taken the opportunity to make minor edits and layout changes to make the material work better on the screen. In these cases I may have edited for sense, corrected spelling or punctuation (including capitalization and the removeal of the wargamer's apostrophe). In doing this I recognise the advantage of working in an electronic format over the original editor working with typescript).

Of course these changes may lead to new mistakes and I would be grateful for any (polite) alerts to these through the comments system.

It is intended that this site will also include new writing on its subject areas.

This site is not commercial and will not involve any advertising or subscription. However, we do reserve the right to bring products we think may be of interest to readers to your attention, at our own discretion. No payment will be involved.